Buchan's Stories and a Son's Memoir

Further to demonstrate the ineptness of Huntington's attempt to demonstrate Wells's ineptness would require more space than the editor has allowed me, and would, moreover, give undue weight to the negative aspects of this review. For his purpose of distinguishing between "directed" and "undirected" thought, and of defining the limitations of each for the depiction of utopian-dystopian worlds, it was not necessary for Professor Huntington to attack Wells's social thought. Be that as it may, in six of its seven chapters Professor Huntington's book is one of the very best, perhaps the best, yet to appear on Wells's science fiction, and is also one that offers new and valuable insights for the study of Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury. R. D. Mullen Indiana State University 7. BUCHAN'S STORIES AND A SON'S MEMOIR David Daniell, ed. The Best Short Stories of John Buchan, Vol. II. London: Michael Joseph, 1982. $8.50 William Buchan. John Buchan: A Memoir. London: Buchan & Enright , 1982. $9.95 John Buchan appears destined to remain one of those writers about whom nearly every critic begins an essay on a defensive note. Due to a handful of Indiscreet phrases in certain of his thrillers he has been misrepresented as antl-semitlc, snobbish, and even homosexual. Phrases about Jews, stories peopled by characters who seem to be striving only for success, and some problems depicting women as believable characters have all been reasons for dismissing his work from further discussion. During the centennial of his birth in 1975, each of these chestnuts was pulled from storage and made to serve the purpose of honest criticism. Among the critics who sprang to Buchan's defense that year was David Daniell, whose The Interpreter's House: A Critical Assessment of the Work of John Buchan (Thomas Nelson) still stands as the only full-length analysis of Buchan. Five years later, Daniell edited a selection of 12 stories called The Best Short Stories of John Buchan which went far to substantiate the centennial assessments. Buchan's short stories deserve to be better known. While the original volume has been allowed to go out of print, Dr. Daniell has added to the collection with a second selection of H stories which make up volume H. There remain about 30 stories as yet untouched so we may expect at least two more volumes if not a Complete Short Stories in one volume. Daniell is a perceptive, if uneven critic. The Interpreter's House begins well with a sound and close scrutiny of the early and less well known novels, Sir Quixote of the Moors, John Burnet of Barns, and A Lost Lady of Old Years. He does a firstrate job of examining the strengths and weaknesses of Buchan's powers of description and indicates some of the relationships between Buchan's own reading, these early tales, and the greater ones to follow. Perhaps he attempts too much, for it is not only the fiction which is under analysis in the book, but the non-fiction, the biographies and histories as well. 329 While these are deserving of attention (so many of Buchan's themes, enthusiasms, and ideas may be found there as well as in his fiction) Daniell seems uneasy in dealing with them. He spends far more time enumerating the contents of a minor monograph on Brasenose College than he does in discussing any of the major biographies, with the exception of Sir Walter Scott. As a result, the reader who has not read widely in Buchan may feel at a loss to recognize the major from the minor works. That Daniell himself has read widely in Buchan goes without saying. This does not, however, prevent him from certain lapses of sense from time to time. Although he discusses A Lost Lady of Old Years at some length and indicates a knowledge of the essays in Some Eighteenth Century Byways, he seems not to have recognized a connection between the two. The first fictionalized a figure from history which the second treats as a sober fact, John Murray of Broughton, secretary to Prince Charles, the Pretender. It was his role in history which suggested his...